The Daily: Wednesday 21st June 2023
Thoughts on $audi Arabia and Scotland's excellent run continues... eventually.
Many apologies for the late delivery of this morning’s newsletter. The extremely delayed end to the Scotland vs Georgia match last night pushed back my being able to write this to the following morning.
On why I’m unconcerned about the Saudi bulk purchasing of Premier League stars
It’s probably already the case that the big transfer story of the summer will not concern any individual shifting from enorm-o-club to another, but the Saudi Public Investment Fund rushing around Europe’s top leagues like they’re on some sort of late-stage capitalism billionaires version of Supermarket Sweep, pushing a gold shopping trolley and shovelling players into it as though they’re on a timer. Careful with that N’Golo Kante, your highness, he’s delicate.
And I’m finding it difficult to get animated about it, because this wouldn’t be the End of the Football. It would be the end of a model of football that most of us have been on the receiving end of for four decades or longer. For supporters of the vast majority of clubs, all that will change is the names at the top, on some far-distant mountain, the summit of which we’re already barred from ascending to. Okay, once every few years someone might buy their way in, or a perfect conflation of everything coming together at the right time might win it for an outsider, but in the case of the former all you can really do is shrug, and in the case of the latter, well, that will usually only last for one season because the richer clubs will start circling in their Gingerbread vans come the summer, making cooing noises through the media while showering coveted players with more bank notes than they’d ever believed imaginable.
The Big Six only stopped short of a European Super League two years ago after they were shamed out of doing it by their own fans. Project Big Picture, another Big Six Production, had come just months earlier. The land-grabbing had already begun. All that changing is who’s doing it. My objections to Saudi Arabia aren’t based on the colour of their skin or their religion. Don’t be so bloody ridiculous. They’re based on the way their government treats LGBTQ+ people, on women’s rights, and on their continuing contribution towards the heat death of the Earth as a result of the ongoing mining of fossil fuels. I will object to anybody over that, regardless of any other considerations whatsoever. And yes, I more than acknowledge that English physicians could heal thyselves on these matters, both historically and in the present day.
But I have plenty of objections to the modern way of doing things in terms of the European club football, as well. Swathes of supporters have been priced out of the game, not only from actually attending matches but also from even watching a lot of it on the television. This is in no small part what funded the vast revenue gaps between those who play Champions League football, to those who play Premier League football, and then down to the rest. The only thing that seems to have ‘trickled down’ to the rest of the game from the very top since the formation of the Premier League has been hyper wage-inflation, with not-insignificant damage having been done to smaller clubs who have to keep paying frankly more than they can afford just to having any realistic chance whatsoever of keeping up.
And as I’ve been shouting from the rooftops for months, now, the lower leagues have been been doing just fine, enjoying a renaissance since crowds were properly let back into matches again in 2021 following the pandemic lockdowns. The reasons for this are largely anecdotal, but there is a clear body of evidence that these increases include some of those who’ve already been priced out or have otherwise have fallen out of love with “elite level” football. The profile of the National League has never been higher, and crowds across the non-league game have risen at wholly unexpected rates.
I won’t watch the Saudi Pro League. Even reducing myself to no more than a consumer, it’s just not really my thing. I started to watch more Champions & Europa League, Serie A and Bundesliga football while working for F365 and I’ve had a bit of a thing for Ligue Un going back to the mid-1980s, but broadly speaking I have no interest in watching all the star players congregated in one place. My big exception to this, of course, is the World Cup, but FIFA are probably going to fuck that, too. And of course, it’s not a matter of merely being a consumer, is it?
The worst case scenario is that the model of football that Western Europe has become wedded to for the last thirty years has to give itself a bit of a rethink. Perhaps it might even start to become a sport again. What really concerns me is the idea of clubs being bought en masse, because they are community institutions with a value that far transcends what happens on the pitch. The acquisition of soft power through manipulating those institutions provokes a level of abhorrence in me far greater than players. Regulation against this needs to be tighter. If we apply Occam’s razor to the large number of players being funnelled from Chelsea to Saudi Arabia as a very convenient rule to swerve FFP, then there is definitely something there which requires further investigation.
But there will always be a game on, and if there is any sort of “crisis” on the horizon for European club football, then it might even be considered a logical conclusion to a trajectory that it has been on for decades. Might a European Super League come from it? Well, the mechanisms are already coming to prevent that from happening by law. As things stand, this is due to be in place for the 2024/25 season. Perhaps one of the questions of the 2023/24 season will turn out to be whether that’s soon enough.
Scotland the soaked
Well, they got there in the end. Scotland moved eight [EIGHT] points clear at the top of their Euro 2024 qualifying group with a 2-0 win against Georgia last night, but this was a match that came within a hair’s breadth of not even being completed. Even at kick-off time, it was clear that the Hampden Park turf was sodden to the point of being unusable, with water spraying everywhere every time the ball bounced and slowing up alarmingly on the paddy field-esque surface.
Scotland took the lead after six minutes with a Callum McGregor shot through a crowded penalty aarea after a corner was only half-cleared, but within a minute of the goal being scored the referee was consulting with other UEFA officials over whether the game would be able to continue. With almost ten minutes on the clock, the players were taken from the pitch and it was confirmed that the match would be delayed.
It took three inspections before the players returned to action, by which time the Georgian players had made their feelings on returning to the pitch perfectly clear. There’s a case to be made for them being unhappy over this. It was clear from kick-off time that the pitch was unplayable, so why were the first six minutes of the game played, only for it to then be decided that the game couldn’t continue after Scotland had scored the first goal of the evening? The Scotland supporters made their feelings on the matter known by booing them when they eventually reemerged onto the pitch.
It seemed like a fair enough complaint, but it was never going to be overturned. Had the referee come back out and said that they were going to restart to game from the initial kick-off, Scotland would have had equal cause for grievance. After all, conditions are the same for both teams and they were no more in control of the weather than anyone else. In the meantime, the Hampden Park tannoy man kept himself entertained by playing a selection of rain-related songs over the stadium public address system.
But the strangest news of the evening was that of what would happen were the game to be postponed altogether. It was confirmed that if the match had to be called off, a pitch inspection would be held at Hampden Park with the intention of playing the match there. But if the Hampden surface was still unplayable, the match would instead be moved to the 8,000-capacity St Mirren Park, 11 miles away. It wasn’t clear whether this match would be played behind closed doors and if it wasn’t, then who would be allowed entrance, if anyone. And that’s before asking the question whether another grass playing surface a eleven miles away would have been any better than the pitch at Hampden Park. Heavy rain of this sort can be highly localised, but suggesting an alternative venue so close felt… strange.
In the end, such concerns were an irrelevance. The players eventually re-emerged and got back on with things, and by the time the evening was over Scotland had won 2-0, with a second goal having been scored two minutes into the second half by noted goal machine Scott McTominy. It was an excellent performance in almost impossible conditions to go eight points clear at the top of their group. Both Spain and Norway have games in hand on them and they still have to play both again, but they’ve put themselves in a commanding position at the top of their group and given themselves the best chance possible qualifying for their second Euros in a row.